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Monthly Archives: April 2012

Valerie Leftman was there. Some said she was the cause. Some wouldn’t even look at her. Some treated her like she was a criminal.

Some said she was the reason her boyfriend fired on her classmates and turned their town upside-down.

It started with a list. Valerie and her boyfriend, Nick, were sick of how people were treating them. Sick of how they never got to be winners. Sick of being looked down on. So they wrote a list. They wrote down the names of the people who made their lives miserable…

… it was never supposed to go so bad.

But it did.

“If you asked ten readers what HATE LIST was about, they’d answer, ‘It’s about a school shooting.’ But for me, HATE LIST was never a story about a school shooting. From day one, this story was Valerie’s story,” Brown says in the author’s note.

That’s exactly it. This is NOT a story about a school shooting. It is so much more.

HATE LIST follows Valerie in the year after the shooting. It takes you inside her head to explore her struggle with coping and moving on after what happened. You follow her to therapy and hear what her classmates are saying about her.

Trust me when I say that some of it isn’t pretty. However, that is exactly what makes this story so moving. It goes beyond the sugarcoating and the so-called ‘uplifting recovery’ that you hear on the news after disaster areas start to rebuild themselves.

HATE LIST one of those books that will dig itself into you and not let go. It will force you to think about life, actions, and how, like it or not, everything you do has an effect on the world.

There is a reason this book has been winning so many awards, including most recently the Gateway Reader’s Award given by the Missouri Association of School Librarians. It is all the message without the lecture.

Step back three months before the story takes place. It starts out as a beautiful spring day for Amy Curry. She is driving and listening to Elvis music with her dad when another driver hits them, killing Amy’s father and altering Amy’s life in many unwanted ways.

By June, Amy’s mother has sold their California home and is ready to go to Connecticut to start a new life. Amy is the last one to leave- her mother left a month before and her twin brother was in a rehab center in North Carolina.

Everything was packed and ready to go, except for one problem. Since the accident, Amy has been afraid to drive. However, she still needed to get their car across the country.

Enter Roger, the son of Mrs.Curry’s friend. He was going to Pennsylvania to visit his father, so it was arranged that he would drive Amy to Connecticut.

Amy’s mom had left a route and driving directions for the two of them to follow. It would have gotten them across the country in a few short days with minimum stops.

After only a few hours of driving, Amy and Roger get a better idea. Both of them had unfinished business in various places, so they decide to take a little detour away from Mrs.Curry’s route.

Between Amy’s struggle with her loss, the unique people they meet along the way, and Amy’s clever journal entries, readers will be smiling after every page.

When a friend told me I should read this, my first thought was ‘I don’t read much that doesn’t involve something exploding at one point or another’. This goes to show how awesome it is to read something different every now and then. The characters are wonderfully written, and the entire story will almost make you want to take a road trip.

Liked Amy and Roger’s Epic Detour? You might also enjoy…Saving Zoe by Alyson NoelMemoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle ZevinPerfect Escape by Jennifer Brown (coming in July)

Welcome to the world of 17 year-old Gaby Rodriguez. Important to say, her family’s history is not so great. Her mother’s first husband abandoned her seven kids after divorcing Gaby’s mother. (Gaby came along a few years later). All of her siblings had either gotten pregnant, or had gotten someone pregnant, when they were teenagers. As a little girl, Gaby had to help babysit all *gulp* 31 of her nieces and nephews.

The likelihood of Gaby not following in their footsteps seemed very low.

Despite all that was going against her, by her junior year of high school she was in the top 5% of her class with a 3.8 GPA.

At Gaby’s school, each 12th grader has to do a big project. It can be anything of their choice as long as they can get it approved. Most students do something along the lines of researching a career or learning a new skill.

Gaby had another idea.

From the beginning, she realized it was both a long shot and risky…

… but Gaby decided that she would pretend to be pregnant and make it a lesson on stereotyping.

After doing her research on pregnancy symptoms, talking to the people at Planned Parenthood to make it seem real, making sure it was approved (along with a fake project she submitted to the school board just in case), Gaby broke the news.

The only people that knew her pregnancy was fake? Her mom, her best friend, one sibling, and her boyfriend. Through them,Gaby was able to get an inside scoop on what people were saying about her.

Fast forward 6 months. The truth comes out.

Next thing you know, the entire country is listening.

Wow… wow. As I was reading this, I couldn’t believe it was true. Can you imagine how much courage it would take to do this? That tiny bit alone is enough to make this story breath taking.

In life, it can be very hard not to judge someone by what others say and what their family does. Gaby taught me a lot about why this is one of the worst things you can do. Did you know that right now she is in college? The girl that everyone always thought would end up nowhere now the first one in her family to go. One word: Amazing. On top of that, there is a movie about what she did (it is on 4/14 on Lifetime!), a book (duh) and she even got flown out to New York to be on the Today Show.

I highly encourage everyone to read this. Gaby’s story will both amaze you and make you think twice before labeling someone because of something you heard.

Liked The Pregnancy Project? You might also enjoy…All of the Above by Shelley PearsallDon’t Want to be Crazy by Samantha Schutz
P.S- Gaby shows a video during her presentation called “Children See, Children Do”. I found it very powerful. Here is a link

UPDATE: Finally got around to watching the movie… yes, it does cover the book better than some book-to-movies, but the movie does not cover everything! I encourage you to read the book as well if you are going to watch the movie!

Benson’s life, well, sucks. As in, sucks in a I’m-stuck-in-foster-care-and-have-no-one-and-going-no-where kind of sucks. But all that is about to change…

… or is it?

Getting into to Maxfield Academy looks like it will be the perfect fix. By going, Benson hopes to get his life on track and actually do something with his life.

Yeah, um, no.

It takes about 10 seconds for both readers and Benson to realize that the fenced in Maxfeild Academy is NOT the answer.

First of all, there are no adults. Zip. Zero. All kids.

Second of all, the kids have divided themselves into three gangs. Society follows the rules in hope of getting out. Havoc simply enjoys causing trouble. Variant, well, Variant is like the weirdos among the weird. The Vs (as the characters like to call them) have their mind set on getting out. They follow some of the rules, but not all of them. They cause trouble, but only in the name of one day being free.

Variant is where Benson finds himself.

As all good books do, Variant continues to get even stranger. War-like paintball matches, not-quite-human students, and having Society ticked off at him all add up to make Benson’s story one you will not want to miss out on.

This is what would happen if you mixed The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins) and Divergent (Veronica Roth) with a little dash of Gone (Michael Grant). The story-line included a ton of cliffhangers and OMG moments, so this is not one you will be forgetting about anytime soon.

The biggest cliffhanger is at the very end. Sadly, the next book won’t come out until October. However, you can enter to win an ARC of it by following the link at the bottom of this post!

Liked Variant? You might also enjoy…Divergent by Veronica RothGone by Michael Grant (my personal #1 favorite, by the way!)The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins